Sleep Gear: Worth It or Skip It

This week on the podcast, we discuss your most requested topic: sleep.

We break down the ideal temperature and noise level for your bedroom, and the right frequency of noise (Brown Noise).

Plus, "Worth It or Skip It?" where we tell you which products are worth the hype (and the expense) and which products aren't. 

And for daily encouragement, sign up for the free Intelligence for Your Life newsletter.

For more information, and to sign up for our private coaching, visit tesh.com

Our Hosts:
John Tesh: Instagram: @johntesh_ifyl facebook.com/JohnTesh
Gib Gerard: Instagram: @GibGerard facebook.com/GibGerard X: @GibGerard

Transcript

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Welcome to the podcast. Get ready because you're going to there's something in in the next 14 and a half minutes that you're going to find that you're going to use for for sleep. So what we've done here is every day we send out a an email blast, right? All the data. I get them. I do too. As a matter of fact, I did like four of them. Anyway, so and so you know really quickly because we send out 100,000 of them every day. You know very very quickly what people are resonating with. So here are the top for just for this week. Here are the top three emails just based on the number of comments, the number of questions that we get from people, and the first one is is about your your bedroom in July, basically your bed or your bedroom heat. So sleep researchers they keep landing in the same range. So the best sleep happens between 65 to 68 degrees, and if you're married, this is probably something you and your spouse fight over. What I do is about halfway through the night, I have to get up, go to the bathroom, and so I I change the thermostat, which is at 70, which is where my wife likes it, to 67, and I sleep so so much better. And then I I try to wake up before she doesn't and put it back. So it's yeah yeah we have a real honest relationship. I think the changing of the thermostat without your spouse knowing is definitely one of like the oldest needling things that spouses do to each other. If you don't have an air conditioner, there are like there are some great ways you can lower your. Yeah, let's go let's go through them because I know your wife uses one of these. She uses a fan, but she doesn't do it for the temperature. She does it for the white noise. But I, so when I used to work at a, I used to work at a summer camp in the middle of you know July and August in central Missouri. I mean, it's humid. It's sticky. These cabins aren't have no air conditioning. I would just set a box fan up, attach it to my bunk, and lay there, and just have the fan blow on me. No sheets. I didn't even have to make my bed for the the last month I worked at the summer camp because I was just I never slept under the sheets. I just blasted myself. That was the only way to survive. So the expert tip the expert tip is not to do that, because unless you can get used to it, but if you take the fan and you aim it across you, not at you, right? And what happens is that the moving air over your skin will will cool cool you down several degrees. Also, this is what I try to do every single night, which is a warm shower before you go to bed. But you have to do it like between 60 and 90 minutes. The cool down afterwards actually generates the sleep hormone melatonin. Yeah, so so that hot bath, hot shower. If you do that over an hour before bed, about an hour before bed, you your the comp the compensation that your body does to lower your temperature after you've overheated yourself in the bath helps ease into sleep. I mean, the best sleep. By the way, a really hot bath about an hour before bed. Take my word. If you're having trouble sleeping, give that a try before you try any kind of drug intervention. Right. That is, I mean, and lavender magnesium salts as well. Yeah, add the add the extra stuff if you want. But just the bath itself is so great. I mean, I have a magnesium salt that I use too, but it's just it's great for you. So there's another tip that that it was always hard for me to do because I always felt felt like I was something was going to attack my foot, but and and kids probably won't do this because there's always something under their bed. But what you do is is you you keep your hands and at least one foot, but both feet if you can out from under the covers, oh yeah, because it's like a radiator. It will it will expel expel the heat. Oldest trick in the book, you stick the one leg out. Yeah, the one leg out is key. I mean, every yeah. The only thing that you worry about is does the one leg out get eaten by the by the boogeyman, your sleep paralysis demon, whatever that is. That's your only concern. But you know, the one leg out is is like is nature's way of of giving you a a place to to offload heat. This sounds like this sounds like it was a it's a psycho. Yeah, he had a one leg out. Yeah, I can't I I can't I can't deal with this person. Why she's got the one leg out. Yada yada yada. All right, Jimmy legs was an episode. She had the Gib legs, which is exactly which is one leg out exactly, and then be careful with your sheets because those of you who live in colder climates, you should probably change out of the fleece seats sheets. So cotton or linen sheets are are are the best. When I lived in Maine, I had flannel sheets. Yeah, it's great for the winter in Maine. It's not good for any other time whatsoever. So, so this is these are all under the category of if you have to make a change, get your air conditioning fixed, get different sheets, maybe even you have to get one of those those bed coolers. That's all. It's all considered worth the money. Yeah, absolutely. So anything that keeps your your. Sleep temperature in that zone is going to be is is again it's worth the money, especially because sleep we know how it's connected to everything. It's connected to your waistline. It's connected to your emotional regulation, even your earning potential because of its impact on other parts of your life. So also, Gib was was hinting at this the the sound his wife likes the sound like like the humming sound of the fan. Everybody is now switching from we all know what white noise is, but now a whole bunch of people we got a big reaction to this on email. And again in the in the comments we'll post how you how you can sign up for the email. It's very easy. It's free. So white noise is static, but it's brown noise. So brown noise is the low rumble of a of a waterfall, or oh, next time when you're playing, listen to the listen to the noise that we're always trying to filter out with our headphones. That's that's brown noise, the plane cabin noises. So the the higher frequencies are turned down, so it's deeper and it's it's softer. It's almost like like that instead of you don't want that noise. It's less you see. You're getting here. So when you talk about white noise, white noise is like the full spectrum of noise, just kind of in that space. Kind of like white light is all of light. When you hear like brown noise, green noise, pink noise, white noise, what that refers to, and you can look up what each of them is. That refers to which which frequency range is lifted up versus which is brought down? So white noise is all the frequencies kind of equal and up. Brown noise is gonna is gonna emphasize the low end. There's pink noise, which I think is the mids, or maybe pink is the high, green is the mids. Anyway, the all those color noises are just which which area of the audible frequencies are are highlighted or brought down. That's all those different colors mean. And you know, as we report on those, just know that some have the higher end, some have the lower end. Brown noise is a lower end noise. What you're trying to do is you're trying to establish a sound floor, meaning the floor that actually covers up the floor below it. So the floor below it would be the ice maker sound in the middle of the night, or the or the dog, or if you have a cat, cats are nocturnal of your partner turning over. That that would jolt you awake, and sometimes you don't even know that, but you'll you'll have interrupted sleep. But but the the brown noise sound floor apparently is is is is quite effective, so you can search Brown Noise on Spotify or on YouTube. They have hour-long tracks. Headspace has that. Like all the meditation apps will have every frequency of noise that you can use. There's just you just have a ton of options. Just know Brown Noise is great for falling asleep. I have a Bluetooth-enabled eye mask. That's right. And so I can put brown noise into my Bluetooth-enabled eye mask, so I can sleep well with that. And the and the experts say the sleep experts say give it like three nights of the of the brown noise before you before you make a judgment, and and you want to set the volume to soft shower, not jet engine. Yeah, that's good advice. Yeah, you're not trying to you're not trying to make yourself deaf. You're not trying to make it so that you can't hear the fire alarm. You just want to get rid of those little spikes of noise in the night that interrupt your sleep and make you hyper aware. Okay, and then finally, this is this list that we're about to do was the most clicked email that we've ever sent to to our subscribers. So it's it's it's worth it and skip it. Okay, there are two different categories here. And by the way, this is so important because we, you know, chachkeys are available everywhere. Every single ad you find on Facebook, on Instagram, on all the social media platforms is about here's this thing that solves this problem. I mean, we don't have snake oil salesmen going from town to town anymore, but we have internet ads that tell you that this is going to solve the problem, whatever that problem is. It'll present you a problem. It knows your problems because the algorithm, and then it'll present you a solution. And some of them are really cheap, and some of them are really expensive. And what we try to do with this, you know, is it worth it or not? So it's skip it or what is it? Skip it or worth it or skip it. Worth it or skip it. Okay, is is this worth the money that you're going to spend on it? Is it worth it to spend on the expensive one, or is it worth it to just get just get the cheapest one you can get because that's all you need? That's what we want to help you guys answer, and we take our you know decades of doing intelligence for your life and the research that we've reported on for those for those decades, and we try to help vet this concept. Okay, so so worth it right now is is the the concept of cooling from the bed up. So you know we talked about fan, shower, hands and legs out. If that's not working for you, then then a cooling mattress topper with breathable cotton and linen sheets. Now what you want to look for on on these brands is temperature regulating, not just cool feeling. So that's that's definitely one that's that's worth it. And then the other one is is you know like like we just said a real sound machine it has to have a brown noise setting. It does any kind of sound machine that that knocks out those little spikes. What you want to be doing. Is you want to be sleeping, you want to make sure that the natural noise of where you live, of like human interactions and owls hooting in the night, that doesn't wake you up, but that the glass breaking wakes you up, and that's what we're trying to find. Is that is that zone where the neighbor's cat running across your roof in the middle of the night? That's not going to get. I used to have a neighbor with a cat that would run across my roof of my bedroom every night. You want to you want to knock that out. You want to knock out like we talked about before the refrigerator clicking on the ice machine dropping ice. Those little noises. A neighbor, you know, a neighbor shouting in their yard. You want to you want to knock that out while also allowing yourself to wake up if there's some kind of emergency, so that's kind of the zone you want to get into. And again, fans will do that, or a good white noise or brown noise machine. And the last worth it before we get to the skippits is a contoured sleep mask, and you're talking about two users right now. It's like anywhere between 15 $25, because and the key is that it has eye cups, and Gib's going to tell you how important that is. So we've we've talked for a long time. We we know that a black like a blacked out sleep chamber is important, and that means even like a light from an internet router in the corner, even the the energy. If you have a charger in your room, and that charger has like an active light on, that that can interrupt your sleep. If you're having trouble sleeping, these are like those little things that start to add up and keep you from getting your best night's sleep. So we've talked for a long time how if you can't afford to completely black out your room with blackout curtains and all the no no light getting in from under the bed or from the under the door, et cetera, et cetera. You can cheat and just get an eye mask. An eye mask will solve all of your problems instantaneously. The problem that I've always had with them is that even the most, even the lightest and most delicate fabric, when it sits on my eye, I can't handle it. It's worse than just a little bit of light. For me, it's actually hard to open your eye. Right. So I don't like it. But what they in the last 10 years or so, they've invented a sleep mask. I don't know why it took them so long. With a little pad around the eye, and it sits here, and then the sleep mask is over that. It's like a hollowed-out circle. Yeah. Basically. So nothing. The fabric doesn't sit on your on your eyelash, which for me ruined the idea of a sleep mask. Ever since those have come out, I absolutely love them. There, you can spend as much or as little as you want. They have them for you know five or $10, and there are there's like 80 $100 ones that have you know pulsing things that help you fall asleep. I don't I don't know that that that stuff is worth it with the Bluetooth. I have a Bluetooth one for listening, but not one that does all the other bells and whistle things. I just just get a cheap fabric one, try it out. It'll make a huge difference. Here's the stuff that's that you should you should skip. I'm not even sure what this is, but apparently these retailers are selling grounding and salt mats. I know, yeah. Earthing sheets. So salt lamps and salt mats. Salt lamps can be good. They they put ions in the air, and it can be good for helping with allergies and and bonding to allergens and pulling them out of the air. So there's there's some think to that. Salt mats are not are not really the salt lamps heat up and release the salt ions into the air. The salt mats I don't know what they do. The grounding mats literally are metallic mats that you put in your bed, and they plug into the ground of your of a plug. Right, you have the three prongs; they plug into the ground, ostensibly to allow you to connect to Earth's magnetic field in a more natural way. Now, is there something about touching grass in the morning that is that is powerful? Yes, people call it grounding. The reason for that is it because you're connecting to Earth's magnetic field. I don't think that that's it, but we've talked about some of the benefits that come from exposure to the soil bacteria, of getting into just a little bit of nature, even if it's just a patch of grass in your backyard, of being there for the morning sun. Like that is a good process. What they've done is they've turned it into a product that you can plug in and essentially, oh, I'll be sleeping while grounded. It's it doesn't do anything. Yeah, and and then when I walk out from the shower dripping wet, I'm getting. It's not it's not electrified. It's plugged into the ground. It's plugged into the one that is that connects to the the ground. Sure, sure. And then you have the recall notice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then finally, don't get a new tracker until you try the other. We're in the we're in the skipping stage here, but don't don't get a new a new sleep tracker until you've actually used the one that you have. Sure, and B that you've tried this other stuff because there are a lot of these sleep trackers, and I I've stopped looking at my Apple one because. Only because it doesn't doesn't always because because I get up so much in the middle of the night, it just it's it's just inaccurate for me and it stresses me out. I wake up and I feel fine. It's like wow, 39% sleep number. I'm like what what, you know. So I know you have to figure out what works for you. Some of them like the Aura Ring, I think, are very good, but but don't start heaping all this stuff on all at once because you got to figure out what works. Right. You know, it's like add add in things, you know, one at a time, and be careful plugging your bed into the wall with grass in it. The the grounding mat doesn't have the grass in it. It's just it's replacing going out and talking the grass. You know what? There's 30 years between us, and and my my my people here are not going to be buying the grass that you plug in. Okay, well, going back to the trackers, to your point, these trackers nothing is the same as going to one of those facilities and having a sleep expert give you like an actual sleep doctor give you all of the data points that they're looking for. I mean, EEG, EKG, they're looking at your your breath rate. They're looking at how much you're moving. Like you can't beat that. So if you're having a real hard time sleeping and you need to see a doctor, that's absolutely putting yourself into a diagnostic sleep study can be really beneficial. Trackers like you know watches, Apple watches, Aura rings, Fitbits. There's the Whoop and the Hume, and if I'm leaving somebody out, I'm sorry. All of these different things. Basically, what they're doing is they're measuring the amount of motion that you are going through in the middle of the night. So, if deep sleep is going to be, you know, no motion for an extended period of time, REM sleep, REM sleep is going to be slightly more motion than even light sleep, and then if you're actively awake, and it's going to monitor that and give you sort of a score. Each one of these companies has a proprietary score based on the ratio of deep sleep, REM sleep, and time awake that you have in the night. To your point, that can create anxiety. Just like it is a step tracker. It's not 100% accurate. It is just a baseline that looks at your movement and says, "Are you moving more or less than you did the night before? That is the only value that it has. It is not looking at your basal metabolic rate or any other things that like that all contribute to how well you're sleeping, to how well you're moving, et cetera, et cetera. It is just giving you a baseline of relative motion and like look is the is the software really good for a lot of them and yeah it's it's it's pretty good I mean the people that have thought about it they're not they're not dumb people they're smart people they've put a lot of effort into it but it's not the same as tracking all of these biomarkers that that a full sleep study will do so you can't treat it like that you can just kind of look at it to see how we're going it's the same thing as the number on the scale, right? You should track the number on the scale to kind of know how your weight is doing. But really, we're looking at if you want to. How do you feel healthy? How do your clothes fit? How do you all of those other indicators that may feel better even if the scale number doesn't move? It's the same thing with the sleep tracker, with these basic, you know, the O-rings, the Apple Watches, and that kind of stuff. So we're we're done. But but before you go, if you're watching this on video, please just write down what stuff you have tried that has worked, and I think that could be really helpful to to other people. We could also do it in the comments podcast. But we we love to see your comments. We love to see because we know we know from the email blasts what to do more of, right? And this is what it is. You know what? What should I spend money on? Yeah, which should I not? And again, I've put I've put a a link to the to the daily newsletter, the free daily newsletter, in the in the comments. And so thanks thanks for joining us, and we hope you have a great night's sleep. Don't don't don't do everything at once, otherwise you won't figure it out. Yeah, you titrate it in one thing at a time. And if I if if I had if I had a recommendation of the of the best thing, well, we didn't mention it here, but it's what it's what Dr. Christopher Winter, the sleep specialist tells me over and over again. Every time we interview him, he leads with this, and that is, if you want to get a good night's sleep, start with a really nice, robust workout in the morning. In the morning, not too close to bedtime, but in the morning, and then work on your your your sleep hygiene, the the temperature of your of your room, getting your body to cool down by taking the bath with the Epsom salts thing, you know things like that before you start popping too much melatonin. Oh, absolutely! And these, you know, these multi-ingredient vitamins and all and all the rest of that stuff, because that because that works. And then, as Gib said, we

got to do the disclaimer: 19:32

is that if you're waking up in the morning, if your spouse or your friend or whatever is saying that you're you stop breathing in the middle of the night, or if you wake up every morning and you you got to you think you got a good night's sleep, but you're exhausted throughout the day, that's serious. You could have sleep apnea, and those sleep studies are easy now. You don't even have to go to a place. They put a halter on you with a little belt thing, and they can track you for a week, and you'll figure out what's going on. Making your room 68 degrees is not going to cure your sleep apnea. All right. Okay, all right. So that's that's forgive Gerard. I'm John Tesch. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time.